Tuesday, July 18, 2017

My reaction to this? I'm not as appalled as some. I tend to work on the basis that if this was a matter of "inclusivism" it should have happened years ago. If the aim of the regeneration is to unlock new dramatic possibilities, then a female Doctor is just as right as a male one.

It's worth pointing out that given the Doctor prioritises compassion, collaboration and communication over conflict and competition, he is already prioritising what would conventionally be called "feminine" values.

However, there is one thing ... as a wise old man (over 900 years, regardless of the body he appeared in), the Doctor corresponds with one of the main Jungian archetypes. For a heavy but enjoyable romp through some of what this means from the point of view of fiction, read The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker. In effect, what it means is that there are certain "classic characters" who are recognisable throughout the world of narrative. One of these is the "wise old man" - which recurs most obviously in wizards like Gandalf, Dumbledore, Merlin and Cadellin. Our ideas about how the Doctor will behave are shaped by the fact that he incarnates this archetype. When people say, "But the Doctor has to be a man!" is it because they are prejudiced in some way, or is it because in their mind the Doctor occupies this archetypal space? From my point of view, it's "just a drama" - the writers can do what they like with it. But maybe that's because, not having a TV in my formative years, I never had a specific Doctor that I thought was "the definitive one".

What will happen when the Doctor is incarnated as a woman? Is it possible for a woman to be a "wise old man", in Jungian terms? Or will we end up seeing the Doctor conform to a different archetype? The "wise old woman", maybe? Will that be a noticeable change in focus? Does that matter? The whole gender thing - whether such a thing even exists as something more than a social construct - is being widely debated. It will be interesting to see whether fiddling around with archetypes casts any more light on the question. In fact, I'm more interested in answers to these sorts of meta-questions than I am shocked by him incarnating as a woman.

Incidentally, I don't know the extent to which the writers are aware of Jung and archetypes. They probably just want to write a good episode and not worry about the rest. That's the clever thing about the archetypes - for the most part, they sit there in people's unconscious ....

Thursday, June 15, 2017

Public subsidies to the rail network, and rising ticket prices, whilst shareholders are paid hundreds of millions of pounds in dividends.

A tower block burns down whilst Conservative MPs vote against tighter regulations of building safety standards.

Private companies are paid to cut benefits being paid to poor people. Their shortfall of money is met by charitable donations and volunteers manning food banks.

Shortfalls in school funding are being met by donations from parents.

The cost of nurse training to be met by the nurses themselves, rather than society as a whole.

Uncapped rises in rent met (or not) by housing and other benefits, which effectively transfer wealth from the taxpayer to the wealthy. Incidentally, my definition of "the wealthy" here is people who have homes that they can afford not to live in. That's a bit of a simplification, but it's not a bad starting point.

Every policy, every policy, designed to transfer money from "normal" people to "the rich", or limit the amount of money "the rich" have to pay to participate in society.

The opposition party argues over how left wing it should be whilst the party in power presses ahead unchallenged.

The media, largely owned by the plutocracy, draws attention to the weakness of the opposition rather than exposing the money grab of the people in power.

Friday, June 09, 2017

The Conservatives promote the idea of the "trickle-down" effect - the idea that if people at "the top" get richer, the money trickles down through the economy and spreads to "the bottom" - the poorest. However, in my mind, this system has broken down. It would be better to describe it these days as a "trickle-up" effect - through high rent, housing benefit, dividends to shareholders, high charges for credit, and so on, as much of the spare money of the poor as possible is soaked up and passed up the chain to the wealthy. It doesn't trickle down any more - the net wealth of the richest 1000 people increased by 14% last year. That £83 billion pounds that just 1000 people increased in wealth by could have had a major impact on the economy were it "trickling down". Understand that I am not being anti-rich here. I consider myself one of the lucky ones, in wealth terms. But the whole foundation for how Conservative economics is sold to the population is on this basis. And if in actual fact, the money is simply being tied up in billionaires' assets, then this is not working. Note that even if the same amount was being transferred back to the economy at the same time as their wealth was increasing (though how quickly can a billionaire spend money?!) this would still represent a ridiculously inefficient process of getting money into the economy.

The point about this money is that it has to come from somewhere. And if the money is available to increase the net wealth of individuals, it could be available to reduce the deficit, or pay for hospitals, or .... whatever. The government is enthusiastically chasing something like £1 billion fraudulently obtained benefits - and rightly so. But that billion pounds is spread across far more people than 1000, and they are far more likely to be spending it in the local economy ("trickle-out?") - and the casualties of this are the people who are seeing their benefits cut when they are actually dependent upon them. This is why foodbank use is at record highs.

Similarly, quantitative easement could have passed money into the economy for the benefit of the population - but those billions of pounds were never seen by "normal" people, whilst high earners in the banking sector continued to see huge bonuses.The world has changed, in this area as well as others (see my post on privatisation below). The Conservatives continue to pretend that things are the same as they were thirty years ago, in regard to these things, which is why people uncritically continue to vote for them, and believe that they represent a better way than the dangerous lefties with their strikes and their unions and their closed shops ("Corbyn will take us back to the 70s"). But these people owe it to the rest of society to understand how the tories are taking them and everybody else for a ride.

Wednesday, June 07, 2017

Basically, the only thing the conservatives are offering is the "best Brexit deal" - a statement so vague as to have no substantive content whatsoever, and one which seems pretty unachievable given the team that are likely to be involved in the negotiations. There is literally not one other thing they have said in this election campaign that offers anything good for the country ... unless you happen to already be very rich (as, of course, all of the key players in the last government are). There is no let up to the threat to human rights, education, health, transport, international relationships that we have already seen from the tories. The rest of their campaign has been spent, with the collusion of key sections of the media, trying to say that Corbyn and his team would be bad for the country - as a means of distracting people from the appalling impact that their own manifesto will have.

Despite this, Corbyn has presented himself as measured, thoughtful, polite and a much more convincing figure for PM than May. I have several issues with Labour. One is that their manifesto promises are financially unachievable. Another is that whilst I would be happy to see Corbyn in 10 Downing Street, I don't believe the left wing of the party has the necessary competence to attempt to deliver anything close to what they have been talking about. And the third is that I still have not forgotten what Labour did from 1997-2010 - the misguided foreign adventurism and the laxity regarding the City of London which permitted them to wreck the economy. Note that I don't believe that this was fundamentally Labour's fault - this was the financial hard right wing, a sector of the economy that is happy to bypass political process altogether, and actually deserved the Icelandic solution of failure and prosecution, were that not to have had such an appalling impact on millions of innocent people. But it was on Labour's watch.

The fact that the electorate can apparently forget holds out hope in the long term for the party I still prefer, the Libdems. Some are still punishing them for (in effect) not being the biggest party in the coalition from 2010-2015, despite the fact that they managed to hold back the appalling right wing programme that the tories have since embarked upon. "Liberal" (that is, anti-liberal) secularists worked hard to damage Farron and undermine him from the start of the campaign, which is particularly daft as the libdem agenda is much closer to their mindset and more authentic than either of the two main parties. It was similar to what happened to Orson Scott Card with the film Ender's Game - it had a profound and overt anti-war message, but "liberals" could not see beyond Scott Card's attitude to other issues, so chucked the baby out with the bathwater.

With a big drop in Labour's polling position, and the largest party continuing to oppose Brexit, the Libdems might have hoped to have seen an increase in their share of the vote. This has not happened, and this is also despite their manifesto being generally well regarded and thought of as the most honest and realistic. It's not going to make a difference, and I can't imagine that the Libdems are going to advance significantly, if at all, in this election, but do at least check that you're voting for a party where you believe in the policies, not one that the media are telling you is the best one.

Monday, May 29, 2017

Corbyn is not quite the poisoned brand that he was. Over the last week or two, increasing numbers of people have given him a long hard look, particularly in the light of May's performance, and have come to the conclusion that he might be prime ministerial material. Also, the Labour manifesto was popular - people in general seem to regard it, as intended, as a manifesto of hope. But Corbyn's personal rating is still substantially lower than May's, and there are doubts that the commitments made in the manifesto can be funded. The right-wing press have grilled opposition politicians (Farron over homosexuality, Corbyn over the IRA) in a way that they simply haven't the tories. Hitherto, Corbyn has not suffered too much, but in the aftermath of the Manchester bombing, it's hard to know what impact public perception of attitudes to security issues will have.

Meanwhile, from having all but an absolute majority of the electorate in their hands (having hoovered up the UKIP votes following their pretty much wholescale adoption of their policies and attitudes), the Conservatives have seen their lead in the polls gradually slipping away. Their manifesto seems to have been one of the major causes - but it was symptomatic of a general sense that they conveyed that they could say pretty much whatever they liked, and they would still sweep to victory. Foxhunting, massive personal liability for the cost of social care, grammar schools, ID required to vote - get it all out there. But drip by drip, the united opposition to this platform from schools, the health service, and really anybody who was prepared to think about the implications of the proposed policies seems to have got through to increasing numbers of people, and the lines in the sand of more and more of the electorate were being crossed.

What we are left with, seemingly, is one group of people saying "vote Conservative, they may be bad, but we can't have Corbyn" whilst the other group, to a much greater extent than I have noticed in any previous election, are saying "anything but the tories!" The shame about this is that, after the last two elections (LibDem in 2010, UKIP in 2015) we really don't have the sense of there being a coherent alternative to Labour and Conservative, at least publicly. There has been small-scale co-operation in some constituencies, with tactical voting being encouraged in some marginal seats. It would be nice to think that this would make a substantial difference - and if the polls get closer, maybe it will make enough of one.

But imagine a parliament shaped by proper proportional representation - even with the polls as they are today. Something like 290 Conservative, 250 Labour, 60 Liberal, 25 UKIP, 25 others. There need not be a coalition, though that's one way of dealing with the situation. There could just as easily be a minority government. What would happen is that the party manifestos would be all but irrelevant - the government would have to work with other parties to make things happen. Can they do that? Of course they can! That's what happened with the calling of the early election, and the agreement of parliament to approve the invocation of Article 50. The leading party (which forms the government) makes the case for something, and persuades parliament of the rightness of the proposed actions. They win the argument, rather than assuming that the electoral mandate that they received (for all sorts of reasons) justifies whatever they want to do.

The 2010 government came closest to this, although the effect of the coalition is that this "winning of the argument" took place within the coalition government, rather than by parliament. The consensus is still that those five years represented a period of effective government, and certainly preferable to what we have had since. A significant number of Liberal policies were introduced, and many illiberal Conservative policies - ID cards, for example - were dumped.

The Labour party have muttered about electoral reform in the run up to the publication of their manifesto, and this report suggests three quarters of their voters might support reform. The trouble is that if you have gained power under the current system, you have a strong reason to preserve it. Theresa May in particular seems intent on using this election as a power-grab - her intention in going to the polls was apparently to silence opposition in parliament (incidentally this statement, made at the time she called the election, made my hair stand on end - that is democracy, no?!). Her manifesto is talking about disenfranchising those without passports and driving licences (that's mostly the poor), and if Scotland left the union, the Conservatives would be virtually unassailable in England. Of course, the tories would say that an end to the Union is not what they want ... but if they happened to be left with political control of the rich south, that would make it sweeter. If the pendulum swings back far enough, and Labour return to parliament with a bigger share, it's not hard to imagine that PR would drop off their radar again. They will continue to be an ineffective opposition, as they have been for the last two years, but happy that they ARE still the opposition.

The best outcome would be for the FPTP system to deliver the distribution of votes that would result in this happening in parliament naturally. With Labour weakened, there was some hope for a while that there might be serious opposition to the Conservatives from several parties - that would have been another goodish outcome - imagine 330 Conservative, 200 Labour, 80 Liberal (as people swing away from Labour in indifference to Corbyn and their ability to mount an opposition), 60 other. But as Labour have got stronger, this has looked less likely, unfortunately.

I suspect that local results will have more of an impact on this election than on many recent ones. I hope so. The assumption has to be that the Conservatives have soaked up pretty much all of the UKIP vote, and so everything that can be done to constrain the mixture of right-wing (which shapes the tory government) and complacent apathy (which shapes most of the tory vote) should be done. My fears for this election are that it could prove a one-way street for some very unpleasant changes to British society. My hopes are that people will, to quote Sheenagh Pugh:

Friday, May 26, 2017

The bogeyman of nationalisation stalks threateningly around the Labour party. Memories of strikes, poor service and inefficiency are deeply imbedded in our national consciousness, and both the (right wing) media and right wing politicians are more than happy to remind us.

It has struck me recently that what is particularly disingenuous about this is that the Conservative party are more than happy to substitute their own analogue of nationalisation - ultimately, no better for the consumer.

The public logic is as follows: a nationalised industry is uncompetitive and inefficient, likely offering poor service. If it is privatised and opened up to competition, this will drive prices down and result in an improved service. That was the historical logic - the Conservatives of the 1980s had many faults, but this was their agenda, and there's little doubt that the big privatisations of that era - BT, British Airways, British Gas, BAA - have ended up doing the job better as private companies than the were doing as effectively parts of the government.

However, the more recent privatisations seem to have been less about the ideology of the most effective way to run a public service and more to do with transfer of wealth to a de facto plutocracy. Privatisation of electricity, water boards and the railway have not apparently resulted in genuinely open and competitive markets. Employees have suffered, and customers have seen little benefit. The biggest beneficiaries have been a comparatively small wealthy class. In the case of the railways, for example, this report points out that whilst the railways still require a public subsidy of billions of pounds (that is, taxpayer money), and ticket prices have consistently increased faster than inflation, they are paying hundreds of millions of pounds to shareholders. It is hard to believe that the taxpayer is gaining value for money from this arrangement - but since it is the government ideology, securing value for money for the taxpayer is secondary to detaching these entities from the government. If it benefits the plutocracy, so much the better.

Can you see how this is similar to nationalisation? The policy is ideological - it has little concern with the customer or the taxpayer - it is what the government is going to do anyway. Unlike with nationalisation, the folk memory of privatisation is generally good, still - "Tell Sid", the spread of share ownership and dividends, improving customer service. But that's not what is going on now. Instead, we see markets with no competition, and money being transferred from taxpayers not to a bloated public service but to shareholders. But the effect is the same.

This is the model the Conservatives wish to pursue if they continue in power. Public money goes to pay for school places in academies, which whilst state schools are struggling and having to cut budgets, still anticipate being able to make a profit. The same for the health service - public money again being used to pay for medical work, but rather than state-owned enterprises collecting the money (at cost), private companies (making a profit for the benefit of shareholders) will collect it instead. And this is what is planned for old-age social care. Companies will be invited to provide financial products and the net effect will be a large proportion of the capital from a significant fraction of the housing stock of the country being transferred for profit to them.

This is blatantly serving the interests of people within the government. I read a report that the prime minister's husband works for the company with one area of expertise being the sort of equity release product that will form the staple of the Conservative proposal about social housing. Extensive connections between private healthcare companies and government ministers have been reported (it should be noted, though, that some of these are donations, and politicians have little control over who gives them money).

What's the alternative? Is it possible to have a middle ground between nationalised entities, with their risk of inefficiency, and private companies, transferring money from the public purse to shareholders and overpaid executives?

Friday, May 05, 2017

My fear ... These elections are not about Brexit. Brexit is a distraction, a means of capturing votes with a big sideshow. After all, what is guaranteed to stir the British public from apathy more than a perceived threat to its sovereignty from the outside? What is more guaranteed to turn them away from a party than the suggestion that it is prepared to appease them?

Whilst the EU negotiator sounds conciliatory, and says there is no punishment, the media report the risks of a cost of 100 billion Euros, and the tories are happy to suggest that was the threat. WHO IS GAINING FROM THIS SUPPOSED INTERFERENCE IN THE ELECTION?

So the conservatives are about to be given a huge electoral mandate, and with that, they are going to dismantle the remaining vestiges of British society, under the guise of the need for austerity. The NHS, state education, social welfare, none will exist in a form that we would recognise by 2022. The apparatus is already in place. The conservatives engineered the majority they needed in the marginal constituencies in 2015 by cheating the finances. The potential sting to them has been drawn by the fact that they are about to secure their majority. Money is already being diverted away from state schools, the NHS and welfare towards privately owned schools and grammar schools, healthcare companies and other companies. With a majority of over 100 in the next parliament, there will be nothing that can stand in the way of them legitimately completing the job.

Thursday, November 24, 2016

I had some recollection of "bigger" versions of the game "Rock, Paper, Scissors". What I was really looking for was a way of making it more than two player. Unfortunately, a cursory search fails to uncover any means of doing this. I did find some other interesting stuff, though.

For example, it was used in the USA as a means of dispute resolution (I have never sounded more QI). A copy of the relevant court order, quoted in Wikipedia, can be found here ...

Upon consideration of the Motion – the latest in a series of Gordian knots that the parties have been unable to untangle without enlisting the assistance of the federal courts – it is ORDERED that said Motion is DENIED. Instead, the Court will fashion a new form of alternative dispute resolution, to wit: at 4:00 P.M. on Friday, June 30, 2006, counsel shall convene at a neutral site agreeable to both parties. If counsel cannot agree on a neutral site, they shall meet on the front steps of the Sam M. Gibbons U.S. Courthouse, 801 North Florida Ave., Tampa, Florida 33602. Each lawyer shall be entitled to be accompanied by one paralegal who shall act as an attendant and witness. At that time and location, counsel shall engage in one (1) game of "rock, paper, scissors." The winner of this engagement shall be entitled to select the location for the 30(b)(6) deposition to be held somewhere in Hillsborough County during the period July 11–12, 2006.

A five gesture variant is mentioned in The Big Bang Theory, apparently - "Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock". The existing relationships exist between the first three items, but then defines relationships between Lizard and Spock gestures and each of the other three. Details here. For the game to be balanced, each gesture has to win against half the other gestures and lose against the other half (which means that there should be an odd number of gestures).

Monday, November 21, 2016

Various people accepted the indignant line being presented in some quarters about the renovations to Buckingham Palace. The Metro slants the story here, for example. This article gives a perspective that they may not have been aware of.

My feeling, for what it's worth ... I prefer the monarchy to most of the rest of the political establishment, as I think they have a long view, even if their powers are limited (I wish the whole UK government had a long view and limited powers....!). I think that Buckingham Palace represents a national asset, which a "lucky" family gets to live in, in return for surrendering pretty much their whole life to the country. There aren't many 90 and 95 year olds who aren't really given the option of just retiring. Buckingham Palace is part of the heritage of the country which brings in a lot of foreign money. The lack of renovation for 60 years (! Do you have a 60 year old boiler in your house? 60 year old wiring?) is poor form, and I think that to see the palace go up in flames for lack of proper maintenance would ... well, be oddly fitting in a country which is burning most of the rest of its things of value, but would nonetheless be a disgrace.

Furthermore, I think that even were it the government funding this, there is no way that the money would be directed instead in directions that we think it ought to go - that's not the alternative.

A relevant comparison - the refurbishment of the Houses of Parliament is estimated to cost around ten times this amount (estimates of cost vary between £2 billion and £7 billion pounds), and this will be funded by the taxpayer. And government departments don't have a good track record of securing value for UK taxpayers' money.

The angle on "doubling the funding for the Royal Family" is an interesting one. The crown currently pays tax of 85% on its income, which leaves a balance of about £40 million from which the Royal Family and their estates are funded. So if the Royal Family weren't there, the UK would have £230 million less income. For the next ten years, the amount of money taken from the crown's income will be decreased to 75%, to fund this refurbishment. It is true that the UK will have £370 million pounds less money over 10 years. But the sotto voce implication is that without the crown, we could use that money ourselves. In fact, over the course of that ten years, even with this refurbishment being paid for, the UK will expect to receive an income of £2 billion pounds from the crown.

Monday, November 14, 2016

I'm tired of it. Not the whining of the Millennials - people in their late teens and early 20s. But the whining about them, by older people. "They are so entitled, they think the world owes them a living." I think those people who are saying this ought to take a good look at what they had in comparison to the people they are grumbling about.

Oh, sure, a small number of the "older generation" can remember the impact of the Second World War, the effects of rationing and so on. But the ones who are whining are the people who grew up in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Before you grumble about how entitled the younger generation are, please consider the following ...6 Harsh Realities Of Millenial Life Non-Millenials Need To Understand

The final salary pension you took for granted will probably not be theirs. All the private ones are pretty much closed down. The state ones are much less generous (read "more realistic in their funding expectations") than they were when you started your career. A money purchase pension is as far removed from a final salary pension as a STEM degree is from an arts degree.

They can't afford a mortgage. As in, they can't afford one. They don't have the necessary £50000 in equity (a year's income) and a joint income of £150,000. The problem here is partly that the rising property prices which secured your future as you climbed the property ladder made it harder and harder to get on the ladder - because ...

"As a rule of thumb, you should not pay more than 30% of your salary in rent" but "Tenants in England spend half their pay on rent." Yep, the rent you are charging on your buy-to-let investment to boost your pension is preventing the entitled Millennials from getting on the property ladder at all.

Some of you took early retirement on full pension (see 1) in your 50s - so your employer could employ cheaper people. In return, Millennials can expect to work into our 70s. I am not a Millennial. I was asked by someone who had retired by 50 when I might expect to retire. He was shocked when I told him that my retirement age was 65. I'm luckier than my children.

When your generation graduated, you had the milk round and graduate salaries. When Millennials graduate, employers have found all sorts of dodges to avoid paying them anything at all. Millennials are expected to live at home and have unpaid internships. Forget the minimum wage: some Millennial graduates are paying to get the "experience" they need to be employable. It goes without saying that the company would have to pay someone to do the work that their interns are doing for free.

You got your degree for free. Millennials will have deductions from their salaries for up to 30 years to pay for theirs.

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Obviously commercial organisations are aiming to monetize their internet presence. However, it seems to be increasingly the case that they are more concerned with ad revenue than the experience of their users. Some of the stupidities ...

Mattel have a Scrabble game that connects to Facebook, and have aggressively chased off other companies that have produced games that are too similar. It is one of the most irritating Facebook apps. They have attached an advertising engine to it. For a long time, every time you played three moves, it would produce a black screen inviting you to buy their ad removal packages to avoid a seven second wait - in other words, it was advertising its own ad removal package.

This pales into insignificance compared to the apps behaviour on a tablet. Here, particularly when playing against the computer, the same 30 second advert is generated pretty much between every turn, you can't exit from it, and when the advert ends, it shuts down the app.

AVG anti-virus have a well-established free antivirus, which aside from the fact that it kills performance of computers, does provide what seems like a pretty good level of protection. In Windows 10 it produces pop-ups, and today, it has started producing the same pop-up advert every few minutes.

The "click-bait" slideshows that you get to from social media, which sometimes suggest they have interesting content, now typically spread the text for one slide over three clicks - presumably to serve more ad views.

I remember reading a grumbly Guardian article a while ago about ads on the internet - whilst downloading animated adverts on the same page was grinding my browser to a halt.

One of the main suppliers of automated ads has this obsession with things that you have looked at or searched for. So you look for, say, Converse shoes on Amazon. Ta-dah! Every web page you look at for the next week has an advert for them. Now, think for a minute, Mr Ad Builder. The likelihood is that either 1) I bought the shoes or 2) I decided I didn't need to. That was a search I did two days ago - am I likely to want to do it again today?

These strategies are self-defeating. The reason Adblock gained traction was because of the increasing intrusiveness of internet advertising. If people find advertising intrusive and can't get round it, they will either block it or use different products - advertising on the internet drives people away more effectively than it promotes things.